Shaun Robinson covers northwest Vermont for VTDigger, a nonprofit daily news organization dedicated to watchdog reporting. Previously, Robinson worked as a statehouse correspondent for the Cape Cod Times, and produced coverage of Newton, Massachusetts for The Boston Globe. He has interned at GBH, Boston public radio, and did a six-month co-op at The Patriot Ledger, a daily paper in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he covered hundreds of stories, from a subway derailment to an 84-day sanitation workers’ strike. When Robinson was editor-in-chief of The Daily Free Press, the student-run paper at Boston University, it won the 2019 New England College Newspaper of the Year Award. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism, summa cum laude, in May 2021. Robinson was born in Seattle but grew up in central New Jersey. He’s a lifelong soccer fan, and is steadily improving at solving The New York Times crossword puzzle.
Beat: Statehouse/Economy
As in many state capitals throughout the country, Montpelier has seen a steady decline in the number of reporters covering its statehouse. In recent years, the Associated Press, Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald, Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and WDEV have stopped sending reporters to the Vermont Statehouse, while Seven Days has dramatically scaled back its presence there. VTDigger, meanwhile, has filled the void, consistently dispatching a strong contingent of politics and policy reporters to closely cover state government. This work has become ever more important as we have expanded the number of partnerships we have to 12 community weekly newspapers, which now republish our work for free. Our reporters provide a steady stream of Statehouse coverage to those papers and their readers, as well as our own.